Sunday, February 11, 2007

A book about snow is appropriate for the weather

I was recently going through my MANY children's picture books looking for a book on slavery to read to my Sunday School class. I came across a beautiful book I bought from Scholastic a few years ago, "Snowflake Bentley" by Jacqueline Briggs Martin. This book is SO inspiring!

Wilson Bentley was born in 1865, the son of a farmer. He was homeschooled till he was 14 and only attended "real" school a few years. Willie had a love affair with snow - the annual snowfall in Vermont where he lived was 120 inches! So wanting to know everything he could about snow was a logical study. The aspect of the book that is especially inspiring to me is that when he was 16 he wanted a camera that could photograph snowflakes. It was very expensive, but his parents spent their savings and bought it for him. He went on to devote his whole life to the study of snow and is considered the expert in the field.

Wow! That really makes me think when one of my children has a passion, but no money. I want to encourage their constructive interests and help them out if I can. Who knows where it might lead? Several of my kids are musically inclined and one likes to do wood carving, so I'm always buying magazines and musical paraphanalia. The hard one is that the next step with one son is a new computer so that he can record properly using a program he just bought. My goodness - computers aren't cheap. We may be able to work out a "buy it now - pay for it later" deal.